Gregoire Haddad we have lost you

Written by Nasser Kandil,

Since we started reading him in Afak magazine in the early of the seventies of the last century and our horizons were getting wider, we owe him the knowledge of logic, he has taught us not to mistake in reading the phenomena from the outside, but to get tired in order to be able to see it twice, from the outside to inside and vice versa  in order to start a debate, we were following up his church and human career, his belief in the equation of God and man, and his developing it as a theological and philosophical text at the same time. He bore the hardship of a church that is represented by the biography of Jesus Christ toward throwing him in the canon campus like the crucifying of his master and professor Issa the son of Mary, the smile and the lovely rosiness were on his cheeks showed the depth of his faith of what he was doing, as well his feeling of approaching the divine truth. We have met repeatedly in the eighties, thus this has led to a deep love, deeper respect and uninterrupted dialogue till his departure before the Christmas, Gregoire Haddad has occupied a place in the heart that is not similar to any rank in the mind and conscience, he was unique in his continuous training on conciliation between the religion and the mind where the center is the man, the issue of God in creation and the issue of mind in invention. Every thinking in humanity outside the man is luxurious theology, or slavery, and every thinking of creation outside right is luxurious fantasy or idling.

The Bishop Gregoire Haddad has constituted in my intellectual, political, and cultural career an essential inspiration, and a permanent influence which accompanied my internal inspiration of the late the senior Al Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadllalah, their combination was a source of happiness to me, they have astonished of my intention to have a rank between them not in the thought but in the purity of soul, the clarity of thought, and the integrity of the search for fact, linking the controlled text by measurement with the relation of each one of them with God and man, each one of them was a human thinker, poet, orator, lecturer, distinctive religious man, and a social leader, impressing through his accomplishments, they were within their followers goals of harassment’s arrows. Regarding the political thought, one of them was a philosopher of the resistance and the other was a philosopher of the secularism, the two recipes which Lebanon is in need of, how I tried to make them share these two recipes, the secularism of the Bishop Gregoire Haddad clings to the reconciliation with religion to the extent of saying a faithful secularism, while the resistance of Al Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was accommodated to Christianity of the Bishop, I did not deny that with the departure of Al Sayyed Fadlallah I rushed to visit the Bishop while he was on a sickbed consoling him and praying for him the long age and the abundant of health, he said that the departure is approaching, and when I visited Al Sayyed Fadllah consoling him of the martyr Imad Mognieh he said to me while we share the condolences, who is consoling whom ? These were the same words which the leader of the resistance has said when I got the opportunity to console him and to hear his voice.

With the departure of both of them and after years of sharing with them the thought and the soul, I feel cold, the resistance and the secularism are heavy burden, in our countries there were shoulders that buckle down but not overwhelming with the burden of the first responsibility this is represented by Al Sayyed Hassan Nasrollah, as well as there were shoulders that buckle down but not overwhelming with the burden of the second responsibility and this is represented by the President Bashar Al-Assad as a rock for a secular project in this East that prevents the expansion of drought, desertification, fragmentation and disruption to our countries, this does not exempt those who were in contemporary with the two men and who have interacted with their thoughts and put their feet firmly where the resistance and the secularism meet together in one project, perhaps this is one of the meaning of the presence of Al-Binaa and its mission, and the meaning of what I am doing with my colleagues and what the Syrian Social Nationalist Party is doing in the two paths of Lebanon and Syria, perhaps this has some of condolence for those who departed and some of hope for those who are on march.

Translated by Lina Shehadeh,